Dewey Defeats Truman Page 6

  Seven blocks east, between Hickory and Oak, Horace Sinclair brought down his fist on the yellowing doily atop his dresser. He had just gotten out of his claw-footed tub, and was still dripping from underneath his robe, but he was too agitated to finish drying or pick up his comb. He should never have turned on the radio: “… the city to buy up the stretch of riverbank, now mostly private property, running between the Dewey birthplace on West Main and the governor’s childhood home on West Oliver. Mr. Jackson envisions a walkway he calls ‘Road to Prosperity,’ featuring permanent exhibits and structures that will illustrate both Dewey’s career and the history of Owosso. At the present time, some of the land, which runs north past Curwood Castle, makes up the backyards of homeowners on John Street. But Mr. Jackson’s group …” It was a wonder he hadn’t slipped on the little octagonal tiles in the bathroom. It was a wonder he wasn’t slipping now, as he lumbered downstairs to the parlor and squeezed himself between his old chesterfield sofa and the table on which he had set down Ivanhoe for the night. He pulled back the drapes’ heavy green swag and glowered at Jackson’s ranch house across the street. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, before promptly apologizing to the only other person in the room, an oil painting of the late Mrs. Sinclair. He squeezed back out around the table and sat down, closing his eyes and getting his breath, and making a promise to himself and the portrait. The clock on City Hall, audible even at this distance, chimed twelve—three minutes late by his own reckoning. He pulled himself up from the sofa and slowly climbed the stairs. It had been a long time since he had heard the chimes at midnight, heard them “in the Shakespearean sense,” as he was fond of saying about any number of phrases, and a long time since he had charged up any flight of stairs or foreign hill, but he moved with determination now, heading for the buckram box at the back of his dresser, ready to unlock the secret he had kept inside it for fifty-one years.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Anne said to herself, kicking off her slippers and turning down the bedspread. The Time Being was back in its drawer, but on her mind for one moment more. Could she work the reverend into it? The little she knew about him came from Margaret, who, rather than flirting with the two boys who’d signed up for the Guard, had gone right up to him in the coffee shop, bless her heart, and started asking questions. (Bless her heart? She was starting to sound as if she came from here.)

  Had she talked too much about Peter? Been too obvious with her questions? What could she really have expected the girl to know? No, she was sure she had let Margaret talk enough herself, about Billy and how sweet, if exasperating, he really was, and her father, and how sweet, if exasperating, he really was.

  She could hear from the clattering pipes down the hall that Mrs. Wagner was rinsing out her step-ins. On the other side of the wall, the closing of a door, its tongue going into the lock as quietly as the clicking of her brand-new ballpoint pen, told her Frank Sherwood was home. Had he been up on the roof with his own telescope, or with Tim Herrick at the high school all this time? Poor Margaret: that story of how she’d really been searching for Billy up in that window. Did she think she could hide that look, the kind intelligible to everyone in the world? It was the look—

  Anne’s eyelids sprang up, more open than they’d been all day. It was the same look, she now realized—how had she missed it—that Frank Sherwood had worn while gazing down at the golden head of Tim Herrick. She stared at the floral paper covering the wall between them. Oh, Frank, she thought. Poor man.

  She reached up to turn off her lamp. The soft pop of its switch was just enough to mask the little noise traveling several blocks from the corner of Goodhue and Saginaw on the rain-soaked breeze. Tim Herrick, taking aim with his late father’s Colt .38, had just shot out the streetlight that, before sizzling to its death, stood between his eye and the planet Jupiter.

  THREE

  June 26–July 2

  “CAREFUL, COLONEL. YOU’LL GET YOUR FEET MUDDY.”

  Horace Sinclair looked left, down to the Shiawassee River. His eyes were in better shape than his seventy-two-year-old lungs, and they could see, even in the late Saturday-afternoon glare, that the figure getting out of the silver scull belonged to the young lawyer, Cox. He was hauling the absurd little thing onto the bank and approaching to make conversation.

  “It’ll be paved soon. Easier for walking,” said Peter.

  “I like the earth, Mr. Cox. That’s why I’ve got my feet on it.”

  Peter smiled as he put on a sweatshirt over his singlet. Horace noted the unmarked smoothness of the arms going into it, and thought of his own, hung with fleshly crepe as if prepared for their own funeral.

  “Not in favor of Mr. Jackson’s vision, I take it.”

  “If that’s vision, I’ll take dark of night,” barked Horace. Peter’s expression showed his delight in provoking the old man, but Horace took it for something else as well: the camouflage of feeling? How many other young people would have bothered to stop their paddling on a day so fine as this one? He was, of course, a politician, but—

  “Well, Colonel, the river has plenty of other pretty stretches that will be left untouched.”

  “But not this one.”

  “Is it that castle you don’t want diminished by a new setting?” Peter gestured to Curwood’s creation across the river and past a couple of empty rowboats that were always tied up in front of it. Horace just snorted.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Peter. “Did something special happen here, Colonel? I’ll bet this was your spot to bring Mrs. Sinclair, back when you were—”

  “I beg your pardon!” Horace started to walk away, but a slip of his left foot and Peter’s rescuing arm nailed him to the spot.

  “Steady, Colonel. Here we go.” Peter led the two of them to higher ground, halfway up toward the Armory and high school; Horace accepted his offer of a cigarette.

  “You’ve lived your whole life here?” asked Peter.

  “Except for my months in Cuba,” said Horace, “and in Florida before that. Training.”

  Horace now expected a San Juan Hill question, but all Peter asked was: “And you’ve really never had a car? Like Harold Feller said?”

  “I never had the need.” He pointed toward a spot a few hundred yards east. “I had my accountant’s office, a two-man operation, right back there on Exchange Street, until I retired in ’41.”

  “A good living?”

  “It provided much of what Mrs. Sinclair and I wanted. The rest we provided each other.”

  “Have you got any children, Colonel?”

  “We were never so blessed.” Horace paused, and looked down the bank. “You’re full of questions, Mr. Cox. How about answering them yourself? Shouldn’t a fellow your age be starting a family? Every magazine I read says that you’re part of a frighteningly fertile generation.”

  “I haven’t got the girl yet.”

  “I just browsed some books with the one you’re hoping to get.”

  “Am I that obvious?” Peter asked.

  “No, I just expect you to have that much sense. She’s a delightful young woman. She knows things about this town that some people born here have yet to find out.”

  “Is that a fact,” said Peter.

  “You didn’t ask me about Teddy Roosevelt, but she did, a couple of months ago, when I was in the shop. Specifically, about the time he came through here in 1901 and gave a talk at the Commons over in West Owosso. A good place for him, too. That’s where they used to have the medicine shows.”

  Peter did not ask what enduring quarrel Horace might have with the old Rough Rider. He settled for observing, “I suppose I can understand why you don’t want the place to change.”

  “Oh, you can?”

  “Sure. You know, ‘the land of steady habits,’ like they call Connecticut.”

  “Not all habits are steady,” Horace pronounced. “Mr. Cox, do you know what I did nearly every workday for forty years—twenty before you were born, and twenty after, while you were at your university in
Connecticut? I came to this riverbank and felt a riot of emotion.”

  Peter paused for a moment before asking, “What did you do with all of it, Colonel?”

  “I kept it buried,” said Horace, who stubbed out his cigarette and made movements to go.

  “Sorry I can’t sail you home,” said Peter, pointing to the one-seater scull.

  “I always walk,” said Horace. “If you want to do me a favor, fall in love with this river. That’s right. With the river. You’re already in love with the girl.”

  THOSE EYEBROWS. COULDN’T HE PUT VITALIS ON THEM?

  The sight of John L. Lewis’s two great facial crops, sticking out like bales of hay that had burst their straps, embarrassed Jack Riley. For once, in the newsreel, Lewis was looking pleased instead of furious, the United Mine Workers having just signed an agreement with the soft-coal operators; but the eyebrows seemed telltale, like some crude secret the labor leader couldn’t keep from stealing to the surface, a disgusting version of every man’s five-o’clock shadow, which each afternoon reconsigned him to the animal kingdom. Jack checked his own cheeks with his left hand, the one farthest away from her, so she wouldn’t think he was about to try something. There was nothing there, of course, couldn’t be, since he’d shaved less than two hours ago. He resisted checking the top of his head, to which he had applied Vitalis, uselessly: fifteen minutes after he left the house his hair always looked like a field of cowlicks. His mother had never been able to keep down those reddish-brown stalks, no matter how much tonic she slathered on the comb. She’d always given up with a laugh, pushing her face down into the mess to kiss the top of his head. The woman—a walking saint, his father would say—could see the humor in anything. She had actually died laughing.

  Tonight, as Jack came down the stairs, the old man, no less cranky than he’d been before the fight two nights ago, had cracked, “Christ, Johnny, you smell like the inside of Reisner’s,” the barber on Ball Street. The combination of Vitalis and Old Spice maybe was a little sickening, so he’d gone upstairs to towel some of it off. At the moment he could smell only popcorn, which he hoped was all she could smell, too.

  At least he wasn’t sweating through his shirt. It was almost cold in here, just like the icicles fringing the Capitol Theatre’s ads in the Argus made a point of promising this time of year. It was still June, but you could tell it was going to be a scorching summer, and since the war people had gotten so eager for air-conditioning that feeling cool was starting to seem as important as keeping warm used to be, back in the early thirties, when the Rileys lived in that beat-to-hell house, two steps above a shack, down by the Ann Arbor Railroad. Now everybody was so sold on being cold in the summer that the Capitol would even book a Christmas picture out of season. The Bishop’s Wife had been around six months ago, but all its fake snow and jingling bells would make people think the air-conditioning was working even better than it was.

  She’d like the movie, wouldn’t she? She’d sworn she hadn’t seen it, and he was pretty sure he’d gotten away with the lie that he hadn’t either. He’d actually watched it with his father and aunt, when she came on a Christmas visit from Chicago. “She’s a real lady,” Aunt Eileen had said of Loretta Young, meaning not some sex bomb like Lana Turner. The judgment had stuck in his head, and when the picture showed up again he decided it would be his best shot with Anne Macmurray, who, if she were naked, would look just like those goddesses on the plaster medallions framing the stage. Or, goddammit, now framing the sight of some dock-workers on strike in London. Their roaring newsreel heads were five times bigger than life, and if that weren’t enough to turn her off union men, Ed Herlihy was informing the audience that His Majesty’s Labour government was having to use troops to bring the British people their still pitifully short rations.

  This Berlin business was scary, thought Anne. They’d all been concentrating on Dewey three nights ago, when the Russians had finished choking off the city. She’d heard on the radio this morning that every American plane they could find over there would be used to supply the old capital. It wasn’t possible, was it? And was this possible? Here was Dewey, intoning the same lines she’d heard come out of the radio speakers at City Hall Thursday night. She had seen television only once, through some store windows in New York last Christmas in the middle of a blizzard, a “live” transmission of some puppet show, and having these pictures on the movie screen just three nights after they were shot seemed equally impressive.

  Not that the candidate was: “Our task is to fill our victory with such meaning …” Those same meaningless words again, even less stirring now that she could see the head they came out of. And that mustache: did he comb it with Vitalis? It was ridiculously well managed. Didn’t his wife ever muss it with a kiss? She supposed it had taken nerve to keep wearing it right through Hitler, but it certainly didn’t make her swoon. Still, she’d probably end up voting for him, if only out of local pride and a sense that Truman fell so short of FDR. Dewey did have the voice of a President, she thought, a nice baritone, even if he was just playing scales with this dreary speech. He’d actually trained as a singer, a fact she hadn’t known until Friday afternoon, when she picked up that ’44 campaign biography—that’s how bored she’d been.

  “I can’t stand him,” said Jack Riley, the first spontaneous thing he’d uttered since picking her up on Oliver Street. She looked at his face under the projector’s cone of light, and couldn’t get over how alive and appealing it suddenly was. But then she could see him retracting his own expression, as if embarrassed by the outburst. She wanted to say “Don’t go away!”—don’t go back down into that shell-casing of propriety you keep presenting me with, as if I’m the fragile nurse who’s just arrived at the front. Stay up here and play. Before he brought her home, she was determined to get one good kiss from that face—the one she’d seen a moment ago, not the tight little profile facing the screen again.

  The balcony fell silent. The newsreel, which everyone always talked through, had finished up, and as Samuel Goldwyn’s name appeared, the only thing audible was the wrappers on candy bars. Music. And then a snow scene. Loretta Young, unhappy, but nobly unhappy, doing some Christmas shopping, longing for some hideous hat with long ribbons that tied under the chin; and Cary Grant behind her on the street. He was an angel, “Dudley,” if you’d believe it, and more annoying than avenging. He went around this town solving everyone’s problems with a wave of his hand. Before it was over he’d be lightening Loretta Young’s heart, and nervous, overworked David Niven’s, too. So debonair and know-it-all, another Peter Cox, thought Anne, this golden stranger come to town to make everyone thirst for his elixir. It was now the old professor’s turn (the same actor, what was his name, who’d played The Man Who Came to Dinner) to be given the beginnings of a little miracle, a preliminary dose of enlightenment. The old man was confessing that the book he’d always claimed to be writing (oh, dear) didn’t exist, not a word, and that long ago he’d lost the only girl he ever loved by being afraid to tell her so: “The whole story of my life—frustration. It’s a chronic disease, and it’s incurable.”

  She took Jack Riley’s hand, just reached over and put it in hers, adding one gentle stroke with her thumb, the kind you’d give to reassure a kitten you wanted to stay on your lap. Maybe he’d suggest they get out of here instead of sticking with this warmed-over Mrs. Miniver—for that’s what it was, one of those count-your-blessings war pictures they couldn’t stop making. Maybe he’d suggest they go to the bar at the Hotel Owosso. She’d listen to his war stories (Italy, she’d heard) if he wanted to tell them. It would be a better start than this.

  He gave a scratchy little gulp. “Would you like me to get you anything? A soda?”

  Sshh! said Mrs. Hopkins, the twelfth-grade rhetoric teacher.

  WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF THE CAPITOL BOWL ON South Washington, there was no interior in town more modern than the coffee shop of the Hotel Owosso. Al Jackson himself was impressed with the chromium counters, f
ake leather stools and neon tubing, over which Kay Schmidt, the waitress on duty tonight, was running her damp cloth. Things would get busy once the picture let out, but for now there was just one customer: a nice-looking gentleman, Kay thought, not too handsome for his own good, like that young lawyer who had stopped in earlier.

  “Want one?” Kay asked the man, seeing him look at the jar near the register.

  “What are they?”

  Kay spilled a couple of Dewey buttons into his palm.

  “Sure,” the man said, putting them into his pocket. “I see you’re already set for the election in there.” He pointed to the hotel’s big reception hall, where a small hothouse of red-white-and-blue rosettes had bloomed over the last few days.

  “Yeah,” said Kay. “They’re trying to cash in on a little of the excitement.”

  “How come no giant picture of the candidate?”

  “At the last minute the assistant manager remembered this is actually a hotel,” Kay said with a smile. “The only place in town with folks from out of town.”

  “Who might not be for your boy.”

  “Exactly,” said Kay. “The buttons, they figure, won’t bother anybody. In fact, I haven’t seen more than three people take one. Where are you from?”

  “New York. Name’s Don Case.”

  “What brings you to Owosso?”

  “Men’s shirts. I’ll be selling them tomorrow morning, at least I hope so, to Christian’s and Storrer’s. I work for Hathaway.”

  “And I used to work for Storrer’s,” said Kay.

  “Did you really?”

  “For about six weeks. Until October thirty-first, 1929, the day they opened this place. I remember setting up pumpkins all along the old counter. First thing I ever did here. Mr. Storrer had had the wits scared out of him by the stock market crash and let me and another part-timer go. He had sense.”